Sargon mentioned in the Bible—“In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him)”—but another king who lived more than fifteen hundred years earlier and came to prominence by conquering Sumer and establishing the Akkadian Empire.
Sumerian seems to have died out, more or less, as a spoken language around 1800 B.C.E. , though that history is notoriously murky. Still, it did not disappear completely, and it remained the language of religious rituals and works of literature for another fifteen hundred years. This left the Akkadians in a difficult position. The Sumerian civilization had reached heights to which the Akkadians aspired, and they wanted toemulate the erudition of their predecessors. But that meant mastering their language, and the Sumerian language was a challenge. Written Akkadian borrowed the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians, but a shared writing system is not the same as a shared language. Akkadian scribes were obliged to learn to read and write Sumerian, but Sumerian struck Akkadian speakers as thoroughly alien.
The Akkadian language—sometimes called Assyro-Babylonian—is a Semitic language, part of the large family of languages including modern Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and Ge‘ez. Sumerian, on the other hand, is not part of the Semitic family, and scholars to this day are unsure where it fits in the family tree of human languages. (Some propose that it is a “language isolate” with no known relatives.) It goes back at least to 3350 B.C.E. , making it one of the earliest languages for which we have any evidence. The differences between Sumerian and Akkadian were more than a matter of vocabulary. Sumerian verb forms depended on roots along with prefixes and suffixes; Akkadian, like other Semitic languages, changed its verb forms by altering the vowels inside the words. Akkadian even had a different sound system from Sumerian. It was this difference that needed to be bridged. And so some of the earliest known word lists were born.
The first surviving glossary goes by the clumsy name of Urra=hubullu , compiled sometime in the second millennium B.C.E. (The title is sometimes presented, even more clumsily but more precisely, as UR 5 - RA = hubullu or HAR -ra= hubullu .) The work gets its name from the first line, which gives an equivalent for “debt; interest-bearing loan; interest”: urra in Sumerian means the same as hubullu in Akkadian. 1 It is a collection of twenty-four stone tablets containing a total of around 9,700 word pairs in Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform writing had no alphabetical order, so the entries are arranged thematically: the first two tablets are devoted to legal and administrative matters, the rest to the material world. Trees and things made of wood appear in tablets 3 through 7, for instance; pottery is discussed on tablet 10; tablet 13 contains the names of domesticated animals; tablet 14 contains the names of 410 animals, including 120 insects; tablet 15 catalogs parts of the body; and so on.
The compilers of Urra=hubullu , concerned only with making life easier for scribes, had no grand thoughts of describing their universe. They were bureaucrats, not philosophers or poets. And yet they inadvertently left a picture of the universe as they understood it. As one writer puts it, “the work comprises a comprehensive survey of the animate and inanimate world, geography, and stars, as well as artificially produced objects, victuals, and many other things.” 2 The most important version survives in the Louvre in Paris, though other copies, including students’ copies (glossaries were often assigned as scribal exercises for students), can be found in other museums. The text was apparently used by students—and, if the clues provided by the text are to be believed, by beginning students. 3
Lexicography became more sophisticated in ancient Greece. Even our word lexicography is Greek, from lexikos ‘of words’ and graphia
Madeleine Urban, Abigail Roux